In a conference call with reporters today, Itskov outlined those plans for advancing humanity's physical, mental, and spiritual evolution and previewed the upcoming Global Future 2045 International Congress, set to take place at New York's Lincoln Center June 15 and 16. Itskov says that the major focus of his organization is to develop the technologies for extending human consciousness into robotic avatars, the kind familiar to fans of sci-fi movies like Surrogates and James Cameron's epic Avatar.
"By the date of 2045," Itskov says, "the artificial body will be superior to the biological body in terms of its abilities. You will look and feel and act like a human." He anticipates people coming to prefer using the avatars to staying in their own bodies. "Eventually I think everybody will realize that it's better to continue living in an artificial body than to die in the biological one, when the original biological body is exhausted."
The next order of business for the 2045 Initiative: establish a research center for advancing the work of figuring out what exactly consciousness is, and how it could be transferred into a robot. "I actually sent a proposal with the structure for such a research center to the Russian government," Itskov says. "But my ideal vision is to have an international collaboration." Ultimately he envisions a friendly international competition between centers not only in Russia, but also in the United States, Europe, Japan, China, Brazil, and elsewhere.
Why put all this energy into pushing beyond humanity's limitations? Itskov says that, along the way to becoming a business success, he began to question the meaning of his own life and that of those around him. "I wanted to understand?what is consciousness and what is the potential of its development?" he says. Itskov says that asking these questions led him to want to "do something important for humanity, to help keep people from physical and psychological and suffering, to overcome their limitations." That led him into his own investigations into life-extension technologies, and eventually to the avatar project.
When we asked how much he planned to kick into the effort himself, Itskov declined say, or even to reveal how much he personally is worth. "It's interesting that I was called billionaire in the media," he says, "and actually I have never told the media anything like that." He called that characterization an exaggeration, but said that after founding two successful businesses he has enough money to fund the 2045 organization along with several research projects. "I will be announcing some startups in this field during the congress," he said.
The lineup of speakers at the Global Future 2045 International Congress reads like a who's who in anthropomorphic robotics researchers and big thinkers about consciousness. These include Ray Kurzweil, prophet of the "singularity," in which humans will merge inseparably with our machines; MIT artificial intelligence scientist Marvin Minsky; quantum physicist Sir Roger Penrose; University of Southern California neuroprosthetics researcher Theodore Berger; and roboticists Hiroshi Ishiguro and David Hanson. An assortment of religious leaders and philosophers will attend Itskov's meeting, too.
"We have to move to a higher stage of development through scientific revolution and through significant spiritual changes," Itskov says. "Natural selection doesn't work nowadays because of the development of medicine and technology."
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